The Memory Palace. Christie Dickason

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СКАЧАТЬ rubble. Crunching over the lumpy black landscape that had been the hall, she imagined that the soles of her shoes were growing hot, that her petticoats flared into flames and transformed her into a burning flower.w

      Her foot crushed what might once have been a stool leg. She stared down at the glistening black fragments, then at a puddle of dark oily water. Then at the jagged rim of a charred wall.

      Here I once lovingly rubbed honey-scented beeswax onto the wooden panelling, she thought. Only three weeks ago.

      In spite of her revived spirits, the blackened wreckage made her feel light-headed and queasy. She was not alone. Everyone on the estate still walked a little uncertainly, as if drunk or ill. They forgot simple things, would break off whatever they were doing and go to stand and stare at what was left of the house. They told each other the same stories again and again. How Master John had stamped out embers on the precipitous bake house roof. How fish had been carried up from the ponds in the fire-fighters’ pails and fried by accident. How the children had brought rain by singing hymns, though not in time to save the great hall or long gallery. They compared how many inches of hair and beard had been singed off. They debated how the fire had started – which chimney might have held a bird’s nest, which fire might have bred lethal sparks as so often happened, or whether malice, even, might have played a part. They wept suddenly without warning over trivial losses.

      Near her right foot, a carved oak rosette fallen from the great staircase gleamed with buried fires like a crow’s back. It looked solid, perfectly intact, but she knew that at the lightest touch, it would crumble to dust. For a moment, she froze, afraid to move. She felt that her whole life lay lost under this black, unfamiliar ruin. The shapes of the last three years, of her marriage to Harry, were fragile shells of ash.

      The stairs and the dog-gate had burned. The upper landing hung like a black flap from the slanted floor of the upper hall. Her charred marriage bed had crashed through the floor into the back parlour, where it seemed to struggle to rise to its feet like a cow, hindquarters first. The massive headboard tilted. Black ribbons of the costly hangings that had so gratified Harry fluttered gently in the open air.

      She could see past it right through the back wall of the house to the nymphs around the ponds. The cat now crouched in the grass studying the charred remains of a fish.

      She looked back at the bed. Heard the hollow chomping of her mare, children shouting, cooing from the dovecote, the thump and slosh of a churn. A woman laughed loudly in the bake house. A creamy dove landed on the shoulder of one of the nymphs.

      My life is not in ruins at all, she thought suddenly. Only my life with Harry has burned. All I have lost, in the end, is this house. Harry’s house. The rest remains. So long as I am patient and steadfast. The child. John, who loves me. My people. My estate. Even the tribe of magnificent water spirits who so kindly look after three very ordinary fish ponds for me.

      She took three crunching steps. Then she jumped and landed hard with both feet. Crunch, crunch. She walked to the bed and kicked it. A half-burned foot-post shivered into a shower of black chunks. She kicked again. Shattered the footboard. Stamped the fragments into dust. Burying Harry and his lies and his disdain for all her efforts to please him. She yanked down the shreds of the hangings in one succulent, gratifying rip.

      So much for his ruinous extravagance!

      She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely. Clear it all away and build a new house. Her own house, not Harry’s.

      Then she spied a gleam, pulled a diamond of unbroken glass from under a dusty black skeletal bench. She spat on it and rubbed with her thumb. When she held it up to the sky, a hot coin of sunlight fell on her cheek.

      I will have such light in my new house, she thought. My house, which I shall build. Not Harry’s. With great windows so that even on the darkest days we will be able to see clearly. Mistress Margaret will not need her spectacles except to sew.

      With black hands and smuts on her face, she imagined the God-like act of creation. Ex nihilo. She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely, knock down everything but the chapel and fashion her own place on earth exactly as she wanted it, where she wanted it. A prodigy house, shaped by her own imagining, as some men built houses in the shape of their initials, or of a cross as witness to their faith.

      She gazed at Hawk Ridge, rising beyond the fishponds and the Shir. All would be fit and in just proportion, echoing the vaster proportions of God’s universe. Glass, brick, stone, timber, both seasoned and green. Tall, wide-eyed windows to let in the sun and scour away shadows. Generous fireplaces to heat every room, moulded fire-backs, drainpipes like young trees, friezes as rich in incident as ballads on subjects of her choosing. Lintels, columns, door panels, handles, the iron butterflies of hinges, nails. She was as ignorant as a pig about all of these, but she would learn. After all, the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl had learned to run an estate. Unexpectedly she had arrived on the safe, joyful solid ground of intense purpose.

      Then it occurred to her to wonder what part Master Wentworth might want to play.

      He won’t want to do all that talking, she decided. To all those joiners and masons and painters and glaziers. He’ll most likely be content to carry on fishing and leave it to me. She could almost love him just for keeping her alive to arrive in this moment.

      The cat was back on its plinth, now curled as if asleep but green eyes watched her above the curve of its tail as she carried the glass windowpane across the rubble and laid it carefully on the grass. A watery shape rippled in its depths as her hand moved over it, like an oracle in a well.

      When three boys raced towards her down the curve of the drive, Zeal raised her head without premonition or alarm.

       9

      ‘Horses coming, mistress!’ Tuddenham’s son, Will, spoke for the three of them. ‘And ox carts.’ All three boys pointed back up the drive towards the high road.

      John has returned! Zeal thought, against reason, with a surge of suffocating joy. He never sailed! Doctor Bowler’s prayers have been answered. The Lady Tree exerted her influence after all.

      How will I tell Wentworth?

      ‘Four carts…’ ‘No, three!’ ‘Four!’

      Why would John have carts?

      ‘Empty ones,’ said one of the boys. ‘And lots of men.’

      ‘Are they soldiers?’ she asked in alarm. ‘Wearing insignia?’

      The boys stared at each other in excited disagreement. Soldiers? Yes, no. But one of the gentlemen on horseback could have been an officer.

      Best prepare for soldiers with requisition orders. And it won’t matter which sort they are, they’ll take, either way. Mustering and provisioning on the way north to fight the Scots, or come back without pay, hungry and filled with rage.

      Rachel, her maid, appeared at the forecourt gate, which led to the bake house and stable block. ‘Madam, did you know…?’

      Dogs began to bark.

      ‘We must hide the food,’ said Zeal.

      She sent the two house grooms, Geoffrey and Peter, both just old enough for mustering, off to hide in the woods. They reeled away under the weight of six flitches СКАЧАТЬ